3 Tips for SEO Link Development

3 Tips for SEO Link Development

Dylan Touhey

SEO link building is one of the most important elements of a successful SEO campaign. When combined with on site SEO initiatives, in-bound links from other relevant sites in your space can vastly improve your PageRank and organic positioning on Gooogle, Yahoo and Bing.com.

Here are 3 valuable tips for SEO link building.

1. Attract Quality In-Bound Links

Google places different values on the in-bound links that point to your site. Relevant sites, with high PR, are more important than links from irrelevant sites with lower PR. Try to develop in-bound links from other sites in your space with the same, or higher PR, values. There are several factors that can determine the quality of in-bound links;

The reputation and trustworthiness of the domain providing the in-bound link. For instance, a link from cnn.com would have higher value compared to a link from a rural community newspaper site.

Relevancy of anchor text used for the in-bound link. Anchor texts that contain keywords relevant to your site are best. For example, if you sell hockey an ideal inbound link would be: great hockey equipment, here.

The location of the in-bound link. Links embedded on the homepage carry far more weight that links embedded deeper in the referring site.

The visibility of the in-bound link on the referring page. Top of the page carries more weight than the bottom of the page.

Link density is also important. The fewer the links on the referring page the higher each link will be weighted. If you’re in-bound link is one of 3, it’s going to carry a lot more link juice compared to a page that has 40 other links.

Quality of domain extension. Google places a disproportionate weight on in-bound links coming from .GOV and .EDU sites. .COM and .ORG are weighted higher than .INFO and .NET and so on down the food chain. Hint – your best chance at negotiating in-bound links from .GOV and .EDU sites is to produce high quality content (white papers) and see if you can get your content hosted on any of these sites.

2. Create valuable unique content

Create useful, relevant and interesting content. Building superior quality content remains an effective method of getting SEO links from other websites via attribution links. Blogs are the best way to achieve this followed by submissions to article directories, document sites (Scribd, Slideshare, etc) and video sites (Youtube, Vimeo, etc). These sites will help get your content into the hands of other webmasters. It’s also a good idea to develop a content repository on your site for other webmasters to pull from. Content marketing and SEO link building go hand-in-hand.

3. Submit Your Site to Directories

Another easy way to get website links is through directory submissions. Start by submitting a to Google Webmaster Central, DMOZ and Yahoo. Although directory submissions don’t directly equate to high quality in-bound links, its a good place to start. We don’t recommend automated directory submission services.

More Resources

For free tools that will help you optimize your site for search engines please visit our SEO tools page.

If you’d like to learn how One Net Marketing can help increase your sites ranking on Google, and other major engines, please view our search optimization page.